A recently released survey on Americans’ attitudes toward their country is a clear warning sign that the Left’s ongoing efforts to radically alter one of the fundamental pillars of society — loyalty — are having the desired effect.

As noted at Study Finds, researchers from the University of Kentin England and Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, found that one-third of natural-born Americans are actively considering leaving the United States to live abroad.

Researchers noted that the reason why “may not be” what many people might think as a first instinct — displeasure over the political direction of the country.

And while there certainly are some Americans who want to leave because of political dissatisfaction, the reason cited by a vast majority of study participants — 87.4 percent — is a “simple desire to explore the world,” Study Finds noted.

Researchers said that there was no correlation between the desire to live abroad and whether study respondents identified a politically liberal or conservative. “While one might think that ideological orientation plays a role, at least in this pre-Trump survey, we found out that it did not, at least not directly,” Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies, said in a press release.

That said, researchers found that although politics didn’t play the role some thought it might, the manner in which study participants felt about their own national identity certainly did play a major part in the decision.

In particular, participants who did not feel as though they had strong ties — some might describe that as ‘patriotism’ — to the U.S. were far more likely to want to leave the country.

America-bashing taking a toll

There are some additional startling facts regarding the study. For one — as mentioned by Klekowski von Koppenfels — it was drawn on 2014 data, well before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race. So the percentage of Americans who want to leave may have changed.

At the time of the survey, 33.1 percent of the 877 respondents said they had considered living outside the U.S. for a period of time. That compares with 58.4 percent who said they never have considered it and 8.4 percent who said under certain circumstances they might consider leaving.

About 5.4 percent are “strongly planning on doing so,” said Klekowski von Koppenfels.

Another astonishing aspect of the findings is that of the one-third of respondents who said they had been considering leaving the U.S. is that the majority of those people answered less than “very strong” when it came to how they felt about their national identity. And while the researchers said there was no strong political leaning one way or the other, what is true is that the American Left — via academia, pop culture, entertainment, and politics — has been pushing the notion for decades that America isn’t anything special, that our country is evil at its core, and that we are most responsible for the world’s problems — none of which is true.

Is the Left’s constant America-bashing having a negative effect on patriotism? And if so, how bad is it now two years into POTUS Trump’s first term? Will the country survive a future crisis — say, a major war — if we have a large plurality of citizens who don’t feel strongly enough about the U.S. to fight for it?

At one time most Americans held similar views of “freedom, responsibility, decency, patriotism, and hard work,” John Hawkins wrote in October 2017. As evidenced by this study, those shared cultural traits are vanishing.